The popularity of the Internet and other networks has caused a migration of various interactions and tasks from the physical world to the digital world. For example, documents and files that would in years past have been shared by sharing physical copies to other members in a group are now often handled electronically and transmitted digitally over a network. In such exchanges between members of a group, it is important to maintain a degree of control over access by various group members, particularly when the group is collaborating with each other.
With the coming of the digital age, one activity that has not migrated strongly from the physical world to the digital one has been group interaction. In our daily lives, we interact with people on a regular basis, and form social groups that we engage with on a variety of activities over time. However, within any social group, information is sometimes shared with less than all of the group members or even maintained in private. Everyone in the social group knows about every one else, and these groups grow and change over time. This metaphor that exists in our daily lives has not translated into the digital world.
While a number of mechanisms and forums for digital communication between remote parties now exist, none of these has provided a compelling solution that can lead to widespread use. The existing communications mechanisms fail to now provide a user interface that is intuitive and easy to use. For example, these technologies do not provide a true group space within which group members may readily know whether other group members are present, access shared files and engage in other group activities. Instead, many existing technologies tend to focus on a single activity or endeavor, such as gaming or file sharing, rather than on the group and its activities and communication. Other technologies allow group chatting, but have no true sense of groups, requiring setup of the group each time a group chat is attempted, and providing no mechanism for transitioning the group to an activity other than pure chatting without again manually setting the group up at the next activity.
Accordingly, there remains a need to facilitate group interaction through which a desired group of users can interact with each other in a secured environment, and through which users can access, and maintain control with respect to files shared in their shared relationships with one another.